The rules of this series: I cannot reread any of the books or access any summaries. I will not be checking character names, but if I do remember them I am allowed to check the spelling just for coherence. I will be doing the books in the order they were written rather than according to internal chronology, which involves some retcons that I’ll address if I remember them. I'm trying to find the covers from my childhood but I may not remember those either, because I was a weird child who didn't keep the dust jackets. I thought they were, I don't know, wrappers, and books looked cooler as just the titles on the spine like you were walking the halls of an ancient library? No idea.
On to Redwall! The original! A lot of lore will be retconned from here! There’s an agrarian society around the abbey! Signs of human habitation persist! The animals are in roughly life-sized proportion to each other!
We start with a feast like always and meet our main character, Matthias, who has the same personality as 90% of the main characters. Which is to say none. He is a novice. He wants to marry Cornflower the field mouse. I didn’t like her when I was a child because I had a bad case of not like other girls because I was a queer, neurodivergent mess. Cornflower sets a siege tower on fire at one point. Cornflower fucks.
Anyway Cluny the Scourge is there. This is a lot more plausible as a standalone than in later books when it happens every five fucking minutes. He’s like your Genghis Khan type, as understood in popular culture, not with a more nuanced and culturally contextualized historical view. He sees a cool building and assumes it’s got good shit so he tries to take it over. All the mice are like, fuck off, but nicely, because they’re religious.
Matthias and a guy so old he’s literally named Methuselah decide the way to solve the siege problem is to get this preteen mouse a good sword. They solve riddles. So many riddles. The riddles lead them all the hell over the abbey, which is like a video game dungeon full of doors nobody’s had a key to in generations. I forget most of the stops on this journey but it’s all just more riddles.
They find out a whole society of really angry sparrows just lives in their attic and nobody ever cared. The sparrows have names like Warbeak. They’re amazing but I feel like their speech patterns are racist in a way I’m not British enough to define.
Meanwhile there’s just a regular war happening. Deaths left and right. On the good guy side it’s most undifferentiated mice, and maybe some moles, who are from Yorkshire. There are also named villainous grunts who are comical but also die horribly. Constance the Badger is the only competent person, and by person I mean cute animal. She teams up with a character—hand to god—called only “The Solitary Beaver” with no further explanation.
The solitary beaver would be a good name for a lesbian pop-up bar.
She and the lesbian pop up bar try and fail to assassinate Cluny the Scourge. Cluny gets wiggy and hires fraudulent fox fortunetellers. They have almost no impact on the plot except to kill some nice minor characters, including I think the very very old mouse, who is I guess like two years old? (There’s a thing in Redwall where they use “seasons” instead of years to mark time to obscure the chronology, so I am actually unclear whether the animals have extended lifespans in addition to speaking English and owning swords.)
I only bring the foxes up because one will be back for weird vengeance.
Meanwhile the sparrows don’t actually have the very good sword. By now it’s been decided that Matthias is the literal-ass incarnation of the abbey’s founding warrior monk. I have theological questions. They don’t have the sword because a snake who is the literal devil took it. I have more theological questions.
So he goes and quests about a bit in the woods. He meets the shrews, who are sort of pirates and definitely shrill anarchists. There will be a lotta shrew retcons in later books because the nomadic Marxist communes of small not-rodents required a lot of further development. Mr. Jacques had some priorities.
Matthias kills the snake and gets the sword and runs back home to challenge Cluny the Scourge at the last minute. Then in their final battle he doesn’t use his cool sword except to cut the rope on the abbey’s very cool bell (it also has a book later). Cluny is smashed. By a bell. Because fuck him.
Then there’s more feasting for all the mice who aren’t dead and Constance and the solitary beaver I guess and some other named characters who do cool shit like Basil Stag Hare. I thought Basil was the best character as a child but I cannot for the life of me remember what he actually does for the plot in this one. Kills rats by kicking them. But, in what context? Could not tell you.
Then they live happily ever after. Until the next book with all the child slavers.
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